At the urging of a Door County Board member, the head of the county's Soil and Water Conservation Department (SWCD) said recently that the future of the mill pond at Forestville Dam County Park could be found in the past.

County Supervisor John Neinas asked the County Board's Airport and Parks Committee to look into improving the pond that stretches more than a mile behind the dam on the Ahnapee River in the town of Forestville, a quarter-mile northwest of the village of Forestville.

Several dams have occupied the site, dating to the 1800s when a a mill to grind wheat was built. A switch to grinding cattle feed occurred around the turn of the last century and lasted until about 1920.

The current dam has its origins in a Depression-era Civil Works Administration project. It was finished with local volunteer labor, according to a story in the April 30, 1934, story in the Door County Advocate. The dam and pond now constitute the Forestville Dam County Park.

“This is a topic that comes back,” conservationist Bill Schuster said at the June 16 Land Conservation Committee (LCC) meeting. “The (conservation) department has been involved in discussions on the mill pond two or three times over the past 25 to 30 years,” including a study published 20 years ago for the county Parks Department and its parent County Board committee, Airport and Parks (A&P).

Schuster said the A&P Committee did a lake management planning grant study and looked at options for doing something with the mill pond.

“Not a lot has changed on that,” Schuster said.

Buy Photo

The Forestville dam is part of a Door County park.(Photo: Peter J. Devlin/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

The county's perspective remains the same as it was when the study was completed, Schuster said.

“The parks department – parks committee – really has to decide what their end goal is," he said. "Is (it) to have a good usable lake? Is it fisheries? Is it to have a river? What exactly is the end goal?”

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources stocked fish in the pond from about 1970 until 1993. Few game fish remain in the pond, largely because its shallow depth allows the water to freeze solid to the bottom in colder winters, the study said.

However, people still catch fish in the pond. An older man said he was fishing for bass when questioned a week ago.

Schuster said the 1996 report would make a good starting point for discussion in 2016.

“I think it would make sense to freshen it – new minds, new thoughts, new theories on ponds,” he said.

Solutions range from abandoning the dam; drawing down water for a 12- to 18-month period; dredging to deepen the pond and remove weeds; or doing nothing and allowing the sediment to slowly fill the pond.

The study suggested some 60 percent of the sediment in the pond was agricultural runoff from fields draining into Ahnapee River's tributary streams.

“It’s kind of funny that in Door County we have a very fine law that you can only poop in your poop tank for three years before you have to have it cleaned out,” Neinas, who represents an area around the pond, said at the LCC meeting. “But at that dam, we’ve been pooping in there for a long time and we haven’t cleaned anything out.”

“One of the things that’s done at places like this,” Schuster said, is “you draw down the mill pond and you let all of the sediments compact over a year or so. The garbage fish die, the aquatic plants die, the sediments compact and after a certain amount of time … you let (the water level) come back up and you have a lake without vegetation with clear water.

“What came out of the (1996) study was that from the science perspective, it was a no-cost option. In some instances, it can last a decade before it becomes as bad as it was.”

However, Schuster said the public reacted negatively when the study was released two decades ago.

“Not enough groundwork was done with the public," he said. "All hell broke loose because people were going to lose their lake; they didn’t trust the county or the DNR or the town.

“At that time there were still a number of lots up for sale and the person selling the lots was pretty wound tight that all-of-a-sudden there would be this mud flat for 12 - 18 months,” recalled Schuster, who is retiring as the SWDC director later this month. “There were some meetings with the town, but the public was, 'God, don’t do that.'”

Moving forward, Schuster said, the parks committee should decide on the end goal.

"We want to get this back on the table, because there is still valid data in (the 1996 report) if there’s some energy behind doing something," he said. “It should involve the A&P Committee, the SWCD, the town of Forestville and Kewaunee County” where the Ahnapee flows to reach Lake Michigan.

“That river has been reclassified now,” Neinas said he had learned in May at a meeting involving the DNR “It’s now a 'poop tank river.' While there’s a chance of maybe getting some grants, the DNR ain’t going to put any fish in a poop tank.”

Two of the five members of the Land Conservation Committee also sit on the A&P Committee, scheduled to next meet at 8:30 a.m. July 13.